Digital consumption innovation, socio-economic factors and low-carbon consumption: Empirical analysis based on China

Digital consumption innovation (DCI) provides an opportunity for the low-carbon transformation of daily consumption activities. However, the social inequality generated by the social-technical system will bring huge obstacles to the low-carbon consumption transformation. Scholars have studied the carbon emission reduction potential brought by DCI, but they have not paid attention to social inequality. The demand hierarchy of daily consumption activities reflects social inequality, providing a new perspective for the study of social inequality in low-carbon consumption. Therefore, we divided consumption activities into survival, development and luxury according to demand hierarchy, taking DCI as the core independent variable, and socio-economic factors as the control variable into the order logistics model to analyze its direct and interactive effects on low-carbon consumption, and further explore social inequality based on the above results. This study shows that DCI improves the low-carbon level of residents' survival and development consumption activities, but reduces the low-carbon level of luxury consumption activities. The driving force of low-carbon consumption is different between urban and rural areas. Urban residents are actively produced by environmental protection awareness, while rural residents are passively formed under the influence of economic conditions. Education and income are signs of social inequality. Residents with low education and high income tend to be green in survival consumption activities, but luxury consumption activities tend to be high-carbon. DCI increases social inequality, and the social inequality of urban residents conforms to the stratification hypothesis, while the social inequality of rural residents complies with the standardization hypothesis and the stratification hypothesis. The research results are conducive to increasing the positive impact of DCI and reducing social inequality, and provide a scientific and reasonable policy entry point for the transition of low-carbon consumption.